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How much SEO is enough for a small business?

We have a small local niche business and I am trying to understand if there is scope to engage a professional SEO or firm to work with us.

My experience approaching SEOs has been that they give me a generally similar set of deliverables including moz or moz-like reports, content creation, link building and recommendations. Prices locally range from US$2500 for a 1 time analysis and consultation to $8-15k for 6-12 month engagements averaging 10-15 hours a month and excluding anything hands-on on our site. In general, hourly rates of about $100-150. In a previous life, working with large firms, this rate would seem reasonable if not a bargain.

As a small business however, my choice is to spend this on 'consulting' or on actual marketing though traditional channels with known viewership/distribution, ppc, or anything that is tied to a tangible number eyeballs. Better SEO will surely lead to increased traffic, awareness, ect... (I'm have a passing interest in SEO and I get the value of it.) But...

We are not starting from zero. Thus far, I have been fumbling around with help from the Moz Community and others. A couple of week nights a month for the past 3-4 years have achieved reasonable results (#1 on many local google searches for 50+ easyer keywords, 1st page serp for over 100 keywords within our industry, some of these keywords ranking well in other markets, some ranking on other engines, some presence on more general/competitive keywords.) Its all very amteur: there is a lot of room for improvement, lots of F's on my moz page report cards, and lots of technical and non-technical ways we could make things better, few significant links, half-baked vertical seo on youtube, no serious content development plan. I don't have time to do this, I don't have time to learn & keep up with this industry - I'd like to hand this off to someone who can help us make this work better. (Mind you, I know I would not be handing anything off, because at the end of the day it will be up to us to make changes, create content, optimize the site, etc...) Nevertheless - make it better.

But how much better? And what impact on our bottom line will all of these improvements have? The SEO vendors we have been speaking to talk about what they will do (actions, reports) and about how SEO is worthwhile. None however can/will recommend if whatever incremental benefit comes will be worthwhile for us. Remember, we are in a small niche (and in a tiny country.) If this were a new domain, new company, with nothing yet in place, the decision would be easy - it would be a good investment for organic web traffic. With the market we are in and the baggage we have (some of it good :) I wonder about the ROI of an SEO engagement... and no SEO firm has addressed this question adequately other that saying "SEO is good, m'kay" and highlighting their past performance, overall deliverables, etc...

OK - to the question:

SEOs - Am I expecting too much from the agencies I am communicating with to get some kind of feedback on what might be achievable? I'm not looking for guarantees or in-depth analysis, but I'd like to have an idea (eg: we can work on 10 keywords you dont already rank on that have an organic search volume of xxx,xxx and this would likely increase your organic visits by xx%); its difficult for me to convince our small board to spend our limited budget on this based on just the concept of 'better, but we'll have to see'.

Business owners - Few of our vendors approach us without trying to sell us on projected cost-savings, distribution/readership or more tangible things that we can use to base a purchase decision on. Perhaps the exception is legal consultation which we view as a cost of doing business in some areas (like reviewing contracts.) How have you justified spend on 'more' SEO? At what point to you determine further spend will bring diminishing ROI?

I have already read a lot other threads about choosing an SEO, SEO pricing etc.. and there have been many, many valuable suggestions and opinions. I never quite found anyone discussing diminishing returns though - and would love some insight into this.

2 Responses

Also since you are ranking already for various local terms either on first place or first page basis, you are a small local business, and are thinking about diminishing returns of more SEO work, have you thought about conversion optimization on your actual site, if you have healthy traffic, something along the lines of: http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/articles/ to convert more of your traffic into sales?

For this I want to redirect you to this informative discussion: http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-convince-my-boss-not-to-take-shortcuts See EGOL's response especially, in summary his experience: "I have found that it is easier to double your income from current traffic than it is to double your traffic."

The reason I suggest the above, is because in local search diminishing returns play a huge role, especially important to small businesses. Ranking for local search is fairly easy compared to organic search rankings, which requires much more effort, time, and cost of SEO work.

Like your creative suggestion. If you've got your local bases covered, Conversion Optimization could be an excellent investment, so that a high ranking website earns more phone calls, form submissions, walk-ins, etc. Good thinking!

I like Vadim's suggestion very much. I have a few thoughts to add. Local is an interesting field because there are very specific actions one has to take upfront. These basics would include:

1) Making sure the business model is, in fact, eligible for Local SEO and inclusion in the various local indexes.

2) If the business has already been doing some Local SEO, making sure they haven't done anything wrong. Checking for violations, duplicate listings, NAP issues, etc.

3) Building an awesome website that implements basic best practices like optimization for geo terms, use of schema, good navigation, etc.

4) Getting the client listed on various local business platforms.

Once you've got all of these ducks in a row, you have two obvious efforts on the above list that can be an ongoing project, namely:

1) Ongoing content development

2) Finding new places to build citations

Beyond this, what the client needs tends to be based on the level of competition in their field. Honestly, if the client runs a bakery in rural Kansas, what you've just accomplished may be all they need to become dominant. But, if your client is a personal injury attorney in LA, it's a whole different story. In cases like the latter, there are actions that I would put into two distinct categories, that you would likely be taking for these clients. These would be:

2) Creative Actions - This would revolve around having someone very bright on the staff or marketing team who comes up with a great, out-of-the-box idea that will set the client apart from competitors by dint of sheer genius.

For the first category, you can hire people or train staff to engage in these tasks.

The second, though, is a special area. You can't pay someone to have creative ideas if their brain just doesn't work that way. You've got to be lucky enough or smart enough to find someone whose brain works this way and who can brainstorm awesome concepts that have the potential to win love, loyalty, social shares, offline media buzz, etc. In my experience, these creative folks are rare and just as often can come from within the staff of a company as from an outside marketing firm. These ideas are so valuable, because they can help a business to break into a stiff market where no amount of the Category 1 tasks will.

Again, what you need to do for each unique client will be different. It's all about the competition - not because you should copy what they do, but because you've got to figure out how to do something better than they are. So, determining the competitive level of your clients' markets is what should dictate who you need to hire and where money needs to be invested.

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